c/net: “Imagine someone creating a deepfake video of you simply by stealing your Facebook profile pic. Luckily, the bad guys don’t have their hands on that tech yet. But Samsung has figured out how to make it happen. Software for creating deepfakes — fabricated clips that make people appear to do or say things they never… Continue Reading
Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002
Category Archives: Intellectual Property
Accused of ‘Terrorism’ for Putting Legal Materials Online
The New York Times – “Carl Malamud believes in open access to government records, and he has spent more than a decade putting them online. You might think states would welcome the help. But when Mr. Malamud’s group posted the Official Code of Georgia Annotated, the state sued for copyright infringement. Providing public access to… Continue Reading
Who Owns the Law? Why We Must Restore Public Ownership of Legal Publishing
LawAr Xiv – Who Owns the Law? Why We Must Restore Public Ownership of Legal Publishing, 26 J. Intell. Prop. L. 205 (2019). Authors – Leslie Street and David Hansen. Created on April 29, 2019. Last edited. April 30, 2019. Supplemental Materials osf.io/9enzr/ “Each state has its own method for officially publishing the law. This… Continue Reading
News organizations have all but abandoned their archives
BoingBoing: “Sharon Ringel and Angela Woodall have published a comprehensive, in-depth look at the state of news archiving in the digital age, working under the auspices of the Tow Center at the Columbia Journalism Review; it’s an excellent, well-researched report and paints an alarming picture of the erosion of the institutional memories of news organizations.… Continue Reading
Around $1bn Invested in 2018 Into Legal Tech/NewLaw Companies
Artificial Lawyer: “Research by investment bank, Investec, has found that around $1bn was invested into legal tech and related NewLaw businesses in 2018 alone (see below), at least in the major markets. Moreover, capital is expected to keep flowing into this sector in 2019 with consolidation seen as a likely driver of further change. The… Continue Reading
Trends in the Information Technology sector
Brookings: “The U.S. leads the global landscape in technology innovation. The country’s competitive edge, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2018 Global Competitive Index, is due to its business dynamism, strong institutional pillars, financing mechanisms, and vibrant innovation ecosystem. Innovation is a trademark feature of American competitiveness and has powered its global dominance since the post-World-War… Continue Reading
The Beginning of the End for the ‘Big Deal’?
The Chronicle of Higher Education – Inspired by University of California’s decision to drop its “big deal” with Elsevier, university librarians are laying the foundation to follow suit. ” University librarians have long griped about the rising cost of their “big deals” with major publishers, but relatively few have followed through on threats to cancel… Continue Reading
Experts, authors and Guardian readers who illegally download books assess the damage
The Guardian – The UK Intellectual Property Office estimates that 17% of ebooks are consumed illegally. “…The UK government’s Intellectual Property Office estimates that 17% of ebooks are consumed illegally. Generally, pirates tend to be from better-off socioeconomic groups, and aged between 30 and 60. Many use social media to ask for tips when their… Continue Reading
Skyrocketing cost of textbooks prices – Four publishers control more than 80% of the market
Vox: “…A 2014 report by the Public Interest Research Groups [PIRG] found that two-thirds of surveyed students had skipped buying or renting some of their required course materials because they couldn’t afford them.Textbook publishers, for their part, have begun acknowledging that textbooks and other course materials have become so expensive that some students simply can’t… Continue Reading
OpenAI’s Recent Announcement: What Went Wrong, and How It Could Be Better
EFF: “Earlier this month, OpenAI revealed an impressive language model that can generate paragraphs of believable text. It declined to fully release their research “due to concerns about malicious applications of the technology.” OpenAI released a much smaller model and technical paper, but not the fully-trained model, training code, or full dataset, citing concerns that… Continue Reading
IBM X-Force Intelligence Threat Index 2019
“As the cyber threat landscape evolves, what we saw in 2018 is organisations across all industries are facing unmanageable levels of cyber threats brought on by the changing threat landscape, the risk of exposure and an ever-growing attack surface. The IBM X-Force Research team is a crack team of security professionals who run thousands of… Continue Reading
1 in 5 corporations say China has stolen their IP within the last year
CNBC CFO survey: Theft of intellectual property by Chinese companies is a major point of contention between the Trump administration and Chinese government. Just under one-third of CFOs of North America-based companies on the CNBC Global CFO Council say Chinese firms have stolen from them at some point during the past decade. U.S. trade policy… Continue Reading
